From Good Idea to Tech Debt: When Refactors Stall

Refactorings and migrations are a core part of software engineering. Our code keeps evolving, and so do the dependencies to internal services, frameworks, and external APIs. As our understanding of the business deepens, that knowledge slowly trickles down into the code. And that's how it should be.

Maybe your messaging setup started with simple DTOs serialized and pushed through SQS. Then someone had the bright idea to introduce Kafka and standardize message schemas. That was two years ago. And yet, half the system is still running on the old setup. Sound familiar?

Engineers are full of good ideas. Ideas are cheap and abundant. Most of them are probably bad – not out of malice, but because we don't always think them through, or we don't understand all the edge cases. If a solution seems obvious, chances are someone already tried it. If they didn't, there's probably a good reason.

Sometimes, these half-baked ideas gain just enough momentum to sneak into the codebase. Then priorities shift, funding dries up, or teams get re-orged. And suddenly you've introduced yet another migration that will never finish. Congratulations, you just added more tech debt.

So how do you avoid that?

1. Solve real pain, not theoretical pain

Before introducing a "new thing" into the codebase, ask yourself: Is this solving an actual pain point we're facing right now? Or is it a theoretical improvement with no urgency? If there's no real pain, there won't be motivation to carry it through – especially if finishing the job requires touching 20+ services, some of which haven't been touched in years.

2. Assign ownership and accountability

If you do decide to move forward, make someone responsible for getting it done end to end. Don't just roll out the first few steps and then "delegate to the individual teams." That's a great way to ensure it never gets finished. If those teams really cared about what you're proposing, they'd already be doing it.

3. Set a timeline (and stick to it)

Coding is fun – until you hit the edge cases. That's when your perfect new abstraction starts getting messy. And that's fine. Good engineers finish the job. If you leave things half-done, you've just made things worse for everyone else.

4. Design for completion, not just for elegance

Every system has quirks. Your migration will bump into legacy logic, exceptions, and weird workarounds that don't quite fit your new model. Don't use that as an excuse to walk away. Work through it. A design that only works 80% of the time isn't done – it's just noise.

Migrations and refactorings can pay off. But only if they're driven by real needs, done with clear ownership, and carried through to the end. Otherwise, you're just creating a graveyard of half-finished ideas that slow everyone down.